


Stan and Ford Vs. The Future

by anistarrose



Series: Stanuary 2019 [2]
Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Forduary, Gen, Stangst, Stanuary, Time Travel, briefly implied past child abuse
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-01-08
Updated: 2019-02-20
Packaged: 2019-10-06 22:40:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,171
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17353937
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anistarrose/pseuds/anistarrose
Summary: In 1963, a young Stan and Ford find an odd tape measure on Glass Shard Beach. In 2012, the last two people that Stan could have ever expected knock on the door of the Mystery Shack.





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, I was thinking about timestuck AUs as well as time travel in Gravity Falls fics in general yesterday, and I realized that while I’ve seen a lot of Mabel (sometimes accompanied by Dipper) going back in time to 1982 or thereabouts, as well as a bit of Ford and Stan going back to fix various things, I haven’t seen anything where a younger Stan and/or Ford goes _forwards_.
> 
> Also, it wasn't my initial plan, but I realized this idea is pretty Stan-centric and fits well into the Stanuary Week 2 theme of travel!

It would be a normal day for them, playing on Glass Shard Beach and working on the Stan O’ War, when something odd washes up on the shore. It’s a tape measure, it seems, but with a strange double triangle symbol on the side, almost like an infinity sign… or an hourglass.

Being the curious child that he is, Ford pulls out the tape and is surprised to find that it lists units of time rather than distance. But before he can realize what’s going on, he accidentally lets go (tape measures are tricky things, especially when you’re just a little kid with weak hand muscles) and with a flash of light, he and Stan find themselves in an unfamiliar forest. Sky-high pine trees surround them, and they can see the sun setting below the horizon, even though it was early afternoon just a few minutes ago. 

The tape measure spews blue sparks and black smoke, damaged by the salt water it had been soaking in for so long, and Ford drops it to the ground. Eventually it stops, and Ford picks it up again, but neither he nor Stan can get to do anything, much less bring them back home, no matter how many times they pull it.

The boys have both seen the units of time on the tape by this point, and neither of them are dumb. They know they’re stranded in a different time… but because they’re _them_ , they’re strangely not too freaked out about it. Ford guesses that they must have gone millennia, if not _eons_ , back in time for the environment to be so different, and both of them get excited about the possibility of seeing dinosaurs. 

Little do they know that because of the time tape malfunctioning, it transported them through _space_ as well — all the way to a certain town in Oregon that acts as a sort of magnet for all kinds of weirdness, even including two twin brothers from the early sixties who found a broken time machine on the beach one day.

When they explore the forest only to see things like deer and owls, they start to suspect things might not be what they first thought — and when they stumble across a strange, run-down “Mystery (S)Hack,” their suspicions are confirmed.

Stan makes fun of the missing letter S and general ramshackle state of the building, and says they’ll probably get murdered if they go in, but Ford says that it looks cool and that there’s probably someone inside who can give them directions/confirm what year it is. Before Stan can stop him, he knocks on the door labeled “Gift Shop,” ignoring the CLOSED sign hanging over the window.

***

Inside, a much older Stan is trying to clean up in preparation for re-opening tomorrow, the worst of the damage from reactivating the portal having finally been repaired. He doesn’t dust off the vending machine - Ford already cleaned it when he rigged it to connect to the fancy remote in his watch.

 _Damn it, Ford, you always had to be so dramatic, didn’t you?_

He hears a knock on the door and ignores it, but then it happens again, followed by two young voices arguing. As tired as he is, he knows that no kids should be allowed to screw around at the edge of the woods at this hour, so he goes to open the door, planning to tell them to get their butts home or he’ll call their parents.

Instead, facing two twin boys who couldn’t be more than twelve and look more familiar than Ford himself seems some days, Stan nearly has a heart attack.

The one with the glasses doesn’t seem to notice anything wrong, and instead rushes inside to look at all the ridiculous novelties in the gift shop. The other gives Stan a weird look, but apparently doesn’t pick up on the truth.

“You okay, old man?” he asks. “You got a hairball or somethin’?”

“What — what are you _doing_ here?” the older Stanley finally chokes out.

Young Stan shrugs. “Well, Poindexter over there —” He gestures to Ford. “— _said_ we were gonna ask for directions, but now he’s… _not_ doing that.”

“Stan, you’ve _got_ to come look at this stuff!” Ford calls from inside, holding a fake skull and staring at a mounted deer head with bat wings attached. “It’s so… _weird_!”

There’s something about the excitement in his voice that just breaks Stan’s heart. This isn’t the Ford that was so disgusted to see his house made into a tourist trap, not the Ford that told Stan he had to get out by the end of the summer. 

This is a Ford that seemingly, in his youth and naivety, actually _appreciates_ something Stan has created. A side of Ford that hasn’t shown itself in forty-odd years.

Stan has an idea, and he knows it’s a horrible idea that’s just _bound_ to bite him in the ass one way or another, but he can’t help himself. Grateful that he kept his suit on this evening instead of discarding it in favor of the less tour-suitable undershirt and boxers, he announces:

“You lucked out, kids! I was planning to close for the night, but you arrived in the nick of time! So let me, Mr. Mystery, give you the official Mystery Shack tour!”

His younger self gives him a suspicious look, but Ford is practically bouncing up and down with excitement. “Thank you, Mr. Mystery! I, uh, don’t think I have any money —”

“Not a problem, tours are free of charge after eight! Now, if you buy anything from the gift shop it’s a different story, but for the tour? Don’t worry about it.”

“We’re _so_ gonna get kidnapped and murdered,” young Stan whispers, but he doesn’t make any effort to stop Ford from following the mysterious “Mr. Mystery” as he lead the way to the exhibition gallery.

 _I’ll only show them around for a little while,_ Stan tells himself. _Then… then I’ll talk to my Ford about getting them back to their time, or dimension, or wherever they came from._

Maybe taking even this long, lying for this long, is selfish, and maybe it’s dangerous too when he has no idea what forces caused this to even happen in the first place. But Stan can’t resist the the appeal of just a few minutes with these two young twins, just a few minutes of reliving the days when everything was better.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I imagine Blendin lost this particular tape measure somehow in one of his characteristic moments of incompetence. After all, we know he’s even been to Glass Shard Beach in canon thanks to the “Blendin Was Here” note at the beginning of ATOTS.
> 
> I’ll probably continue this, but I’m not sure when. Maybe for Forduary, who knows?
> 
> Thanks for reading, comments are appreciated as always!


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> One fateful night soon after returning to Gravity Falls, Ford is unexpectedly confronted with memories from a lifetime ago.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for the great response on Chapter 1! I started this fic completely on a whim, but once I saw how much people were enjoying it, I knew I was going to continue it! Hope this update doesn’t disappoint!
> 
> (I'm also counting this as a Forduary fic!)

Ford is ransacking all the basement’s shelves and drawers and nooks and crannies in a seemingly futile search for his old magnet guns — Stan told him they were down here _somewhere_ , but apparently couldn’t be bothered to elaborate — when he finds the box. It’s old, the cardboard practically decaying, and he’s honestly surprised he’s able to get it out of the closet without the whole thing falling apart in his hands, but there’s also something about it that feels indescribably familiar. It takes him a moment to realize that it’s because of the scrawled cursive label — _Stanley and Stanford, 1961-1963_ — that’s written in his mother’s handwriting.

He rifles through the contents: two reels of film, four photo albums. A comic book so old and well-read that the images are beginning to fade away entirely. Sheets of piano music, showing the notes to a familiar song, simple enough to be played by beginners but complex enough to be catchy. Notebooks filled from margin to margin with doodles of strange and wondrous creatures, dragons and cryptids and dinosaurs and aliens.

Ford recognizes everything, but while he remembers bringing some of it first to college and then out to Gravity Falls himself, there are other things — three of the four photo albums, the comic books, the piano music — that he hasn’t seen since… well, since 1963.

Ford has always thought _he_ was the overly sentimental one, but here Stan is, not just holding on to his collection of keepsakes but _adding_ to it. 

_Stan only would have had a chance to go home and pick up all of this when he was pretending to be you,_ a resentful whisper in the back of Ford’s head reminds him, but it’s far from the loudest voice, far from the loudest emotion. He picks up one of the photo albums, one that he doesn’t remember ever seeing outside of Glass Shard Beach, and steps into the elevator.

He hopes Stan is still awake, because the two of them need to talk. He’s not quite sure about what, but… they really need to. His grip tightens on the old album as he rises towards the ground floor, and for neither the first nor the last time in his life, he finds himself wondering what other paths he could have taken away from Glass Shard Beach, where the other diverging roads might have led him —

Over the whirr of the elevator, he first hears Stan’s tour-giving voice, and then two other ones — young, but not Dipper and Mabel’s, and out-of-place, but not unfamiliar. He steps out from behind the vending machine and into the gift shop, and the album falls from his hands. 

Its spine strikes the floor first, and it falls open to a page with just one picture: two twin boys caught in a candid photo, staring at the camera with identical looks of surprise and confusion. Just a few feet away, the exact same boys stand before Ford, eyes wide and mouths agape like the picture come to life. 

Behind them, Stanley grimaces and raises his hands in a gesture that can’t quite make up its mind between apologetic and defensive. “Okay, I know things look weird, but I promise I can… I can _kinda_ explain? So, I was just minding my own business when —”

“Get away from them!” Ford barks. “ _Now!_ ” 

“What?” both Stanleys ask in unison. The young Stanford doesn’t say a word — just stares at Ford’s fingers, as his own reflexively curl into trembling fists at his side. It’s so easy to visualise the wheels turning in his head, the wheels that are shaking and locking up, like the system has been presented with an input it’s not designed to handle.

Ford points at the young twins, and then jabs his finger towards the space behind the gift shop counter. “Kids! Get behind there!” 

The boys stare at him, unmoving.

“ _Now_!” Ford barks, and with that, both of them do as they’re told. But young Stanley’s eyes flash with a look of fear for a moment, and Ford’s stomach churns with guilt.

“Stanford, what the hell?” Stan yells, apparently abandoning any sort of secrecy he might have been maintaining on the kids’ behalf. “What are you _doing_?”

“They’re from a parallel timeline! If either of us touches our counterpart, our dimension will completely collapse in on itself and disintegrate, with us and billions of other lives inside!” 

Ford can feel the pounding of his own heart, and he’s not sure whether it’s the adrenaline, or that other drug of the body’s own producing — the sentimentality. “You should have told me about this _immediately_! What were you doing up here with them, giving them a _tour_? You could have ended the entire —”

“E-excuse me,” a quiet voice begins, and Ford turns away from Stan to see a small, owl-like pair of eyes peering up from behind the cash register. “But, Stan and… uh, my Stan and your Stan high-fived a couple minutes ago, and nothing happened. The universe didn’t disintegrate.”

“Yeah, we did,” young Stanley adds. He seems reluctant to make eye contact with Ford, and his voice has a slight nervous tremor to it — but Stanley’s never been the type to stand back and leave his brother on his own. “When he said Ford would be the first to die in a horror movie. I thought it was funny, so we high-fived —”

He finally looks up, and stares at older Ford with a resigned guilt in his eyes — just like how he’d look at Filbrick whenever he’d gotten into so much trouble that he knew no apology would be enough to avoid being punished.

“I — I didn’t know he was me then,” young Stanley stammers. “I didn’t know about — about dimensions, or parallel anythings, or… or… I’m _sorry_ , Ford! I wasn’t trying to destroy the world, I promise!” There are tears in his eyes now, and young Stanford has one arm reached out towards his brother, but he’s frozen in place, as if paralyzed by indecision. Older Stan, for his part, is making a point of looking in the complete opposite direction, but his trembling, clenched fists betray everything one needs to know about his feelings.

And older Ford… he does one of the dumbest things he’s ever done in his life. He steps towards the counter, towards the children that could easily destroy the world alongside him and his brother, and places a completely bare, exposed hand on young Stan’s shoulder.

“I know,” he whispers, and all his emotions from when he found the box of keepsakes come rushing back, channeling across time and space and dimensions and reaching one Stanley Pines, but not the Stanley he’d thought he might be reconciling with tonight. 

“I’m not mad at you, Stan. I promise.” That’s not entirely true for the older Stan, ~~though a part of Ford honestly wishes more than anything that it could be,~~ but he’s not going to say as much to this poor child, not now. “I shouldn’t have yelled like that. I’m sorry.”

He steps away from the kids, and finally, _finally_ thinks to put on a pair of gloves. He’s afraid to look behind him and see how the older Stan has responded, so he instead awkwardly begins to speak again after a pause. 

“But, I… I’m still a bit confused about this whole situation. By all accounts, our dimension shouldn’t have survived that high-five.”

“Maybe we just… traveled through time normally, instead of to another dimension?” young Ford suggests. “And like, we haven’t messed up anything yet that would make us diverge from your timeline?”

“That _would_ explain it,” Ford replies, “if Stan and I had memories of this incident. But while I can only speak for myself, I’m fairly certain I don’t remember _anything_ like this…”

“Time travel, man,” young Stanley mutters, “why you gotta be so _complicated_ …”

“ _Remember_ ,” Ford repeats to himself. “Oh, of course! That’s it! We have the memory gun!”

“What?” both of the boys ask in unison, just as the older Stan whirls around.

“What the hell kind of idea is that, Sixer?! Are you seriously about to _wipe our own minds_?”

“I’m just trying to _protect us all_ , you idiot! If we _don’t_ wipe their minds and return them to their own time, they’ll cease being _us_ and become just different enough to destroy the world, in all likelihood! I’ve been dealing with more than enough chances of apocalypse since you reactivated the portal, thank you very much!”

“Oh, and remind me who it was who built that portal in the first place?”

“I told you not to restart it! It was your foolishness, _your_ recklessness, that only exacerbated it all!”

“ _My_ recklessness? That’s rich coming from _you_! I can’t believe I ever thought you would _thank_ me for saving your damn life, when here you are, acting like _I’m_ the —”

Ford has no doubt that Stan is about to unleash some particularly scathing and profanity laced rant without any regard for the children present, but before he can, he’s interrupted by a sudden clattering noise. It takes a moment for either of them to realize that it’s the sound of the gift shop door slamming shut.

“Oh no,” Stan whispers as Ford turns to look behind the counter, and finds the space completely empty.

“Kids?!” he yells. “Kids, come back! I didn’t mean —”

They both rush outside, Ford activating the flashlight on his watch and scanning the surrounding field, but the younger twins are nowhere to be seen.

***

“I’m so sorry,” young Ford tells his brother. “I don’t know what I… what older me was thinking! I’d _never_ wipe your mind!”

The decision to leave had been unanimous and unspoken, and was made the second the older twins had begun to argue again, voices dripping with a lifetime’s worth of unfamiliar bitterness and frustration and hostility. A lot can change in fifty years, but… 

But they hadn’t sounded like twins. They’d sounded like strangers, who didn’t understand what the other had become — who didn’t even _want_ to understand, maybe. They hadn’t sounded like Stan and Ford.

“That wasn’t you,” Stan declares with a certainty Ford wishes he could share. “You don’t _really_ think we’ll end up like them, do you? There isn’t anything in the _world_ that could make us like — like _that_.”

They’re sitting on the forest floor now, backs up against trees. Ford holds the broken time tape in his hands, turning it over and over and _over_ , like eventually it’ll somehow whisk them away again — off to some alternate future where two brothers travel the world together, just as they always thought they would, just as it should be.

“I don’t _want_ to think that’s how we’ll end up,” Ford murmurs. “But how else do you explain everything we just saw?”

“Easy, we musta just messed up the timeline or something! That happens in your nerd stories all the time, doesn’t it?” 

Ford sighs. “Even if this wasn’t supposed to happen… how do we fix it?”

Stan starts to reply, but he’s cut off by an older and gruffer voice calling out from deep within the woods: “Kids? Are you there? Look, I know Ford and I said some things we — some things I regret, but you’ve gotta come back!”

From the opposite direction of the older Stanley’s voice, Ford sees the beam of a flashlight hovering between the trees like a ghost. 

“Please, kids… I know how I sounded, and I don’t blame you for running away, but I just want to keep you safe, I promise…”

Stan stays still, but his wide and worried eyes make contact with Ford’s, and even in the dying evening light the message is clear: _What do we do now?_

Ford doesn’t have an answer, but even if he did, he wouldn’t have a chance to share it, because it’s at that moment that it feels like all hell is breaking loose.

First it’s a flash of brilliant blue-white light in the quickly falling darkness that blinds him, and then it’s the sudden clap of an explosion in the eerily peaceful forest that deafens him. He feels a hand on his shoulder, and for a moment he’s afraid he’s somehow brought about the apocalypse that his older self warned of, but the voice that speaks from behind him as he’s lifted into the air is unfamiliar.

“Time Paradox Avoidance Enforcement Squadron! Nobody move!” it barks, and then in a slightly lower voice, it adds: “You four are in a heap of trouble.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wr ila wkhlu zurqjv, wzr wlphv pxvw fodvk  
> Zkr zloo zlq, wkh ixwxuh ru sdvw?
> 
> Thanks for reading, comments are appreciated as always! I have a decent idea of where I want to take this, and barring anything unexpected it should wrap up in one or two more chapters.


End file.
